Nintendo Discontinuing NES Classic Edition in North America

In a surprise move, Nintendo has announced that they are discontinuing production of the NES Classic Edition in North America. Even though demand is still high, and it remains hard to find (I’ve never actually seen one for sale at a store), the final shipment of units will be sent to stores by the end of April, 2017.

Nintendo has stated that the system, which has sold over 1.5 million units, was only meant to be a limited product, and that they did make more consoles to try to keep up with demand. So far, only the North American NES Classic Edition has been announced to be ending production. The Famicom Mini will still continue to be produced in Japan, for now.

So if you have not got one of these consoles yet, and you want one, you’d better try to find one by the end of the month, or your only hope will be overpriced Ebay scalpers. I’ll pick one up if I happen to get lucky and find one at a store for $60, but if not it won’t bother me too much. I already have 2 real NES systems, along with the physical cartridges of most of the games I would want from the 30 games included on the system. Playing the real cartridges on the real system with the real controllers on a 32″ CRT is the best way to go, in my opinion.

Meeko is a child of the 80s, and a lifelong video gamer, dating back to the Atari 2600. His favorite genres of games are RPGs, Platformers, and Shoot 'Em Ups. In addition to video games, Meeko also loves cartoons and anything else that is cool.